Status Updates From The Stakes: America at the ...

what we somehow “owe” the rest of the world: America is neither an “economy” nor a refugee camp. We’re a country, with our own particular citizen body and interests. Serious countries enact polices to serve those interests. Oligarchies enact policies to further partial, private interests.

Schlesinger criticized multiculturalists as “very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes,” whose “mood is one of divesting Americans of their sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”

On some level, leftism knows that it is parasitic on conservatism—just as vice is parasitic on virtue, incompetence on competence, consumers on producers, and disorder on order—which makes separation frightening to many leftist elites

“conservatives” are not unaware that the left is now at least fifty years into a scorched-earth campaign against virtue, morality, piety, liberty, industry, enterprise, thrift, decency, modesty, and courage

The core purpose of mass immigration for the left specifically (as opposed to the ruling-class passion for cheap labor) is demographically to overwhelm red America so that, first and foremost, no Republican can ever win the presidency again and, second, the Republican Party becomes irrelevant in as many states, counties, and cities as possible

there are only two ways to hold the current ruling coalition together: generate and distribute enough spoils to keep everyone happy, and stoke the constituent parts’ common resentments.
The more that the former can be accomplished, the less necessary is the latter.

is the ruling class vision of a deracinated economic-administrative zone conducive to or even consistent with America remaining a superpower over the long term?
Regarding the first question, we know from history that it’s possible for a ruling class to exercise power and maintain their own predominance for a long time without their country itself enjoying anything like great-power status.

American institutions prioritize factors other than qualifications. The ruling class have (while in part exempting themselves) placed a giant bet that this focus will not erode the overall competence and functioning of institutions that hire on such bases, or, eventually, of society itself

we’ll still go through the formality of elections, but for show, like senate votes in imperial Rome. The less consequential elections become, the more our elites will insist on their sacrosanct significance. The mere fact of holding elections will become ipso facto proof that the regime is “democratic” and therefore legitimate.

If present trends continue, the Constitution has no future. Not only will neither its letter nor spirit be honored—either in ordinary circumstances or in the breach—not only will none of its guarantees be upheld nor any of its limits respected, but the document itself will be increasingly denounced as a hateful tool of racist oppression, a relic of a benighted, evil past best left on the ash heap of history

The fate of the Constitution is also inseparable from demographic change. Just as the least conservative and Republican areas of the country are the most foreign-born, so are such areas the places where the Constitution is least honored and operative

It’s tempting to call this emerging America a “failed state,” but it isn’t really. The state is more than capable of acting on its own priorities, which emphatically include crushing known or suspected regime enemies. Far from being incapable of enforcing the law, the state rather chooses which laws to enforce, and which not to enforce, in accordance with the interests of the ruling class

We’ve now “educated” generations of students—even (especially) elite students—either (1) to have no familiarity with the Western canon; and/or (2) to despise it as inherently evil; or (3) to see it only through leftist lenses that make it seem as if it merely confirms current orthodoxy; (4) to believe it was all “stolen” from other cultures. That last one is, of course, a lie, but concedes there’s something valuable

every step of the way, the Narrative’s reply to those who raise the alarm will be: That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is. You’re a paranoid lunatic for even suggesting that censorship, de-platforming, or un-personing are problems, and also a racist who deserves it.

The basic contours of the back-to-normal regime will look much as they did at the height of the Obama administration—or, in hindsight, the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama imperium: a high-low coalition against the middle in service of big tech, high finance, and woke capital

The real purpose of the Republican Party is, then, not to represent the interests of those who actually vote for it, much less to deliver for those suckers. It is rather to import millions from poor countries with little or no tradition of liberty and then judge its own worthiness by whether or not it can convince the newcomers to vote for the bourgeois-patriotic center-right party over the redistributionist left

Post-1965 mass immigration has primarily benefited and continues to benefit four groups: 1) immigrants themselves, 2) the bureaucrats who serve them, 3) financial, big tech, and agricultural oligarchs, and 4) Democratic politicians and their leftist allies.

you want the checks to keep coming—and clearing—forever. Which means the Western economies need to keep chugging along.
But how to ensure that when the incentives to work, produce, and innovate take a whole magazine of bullets to the kneecaps? Why is it reasonable to assume that the American economy will produce at or anywhere near historic levels

“America is racist,” it seems, is only meant half seriously. Part of America—let’s call it the red part—is racist, but there’s also an enlightened, non-racist blue part. It’s owing to the good graces of the latter that immigrants are welcomed into America to help the former atone, to the extent it can, for its historic sins

We begin to understand—finally—what “we are here to collect” really means. What’s to be collected is your stuff, which—despite what you might think—you didn’t really earn and isn’t really yours.

Here we must recall the meaning of the transformation of “civil rights.” When applied to immigration, the new understanding turned out to mean the inherent “right” of foreigners to emigrate to America regardless of American law or the democratically expressed will of the American people.

We have come here to collect. “We” and “they” have switched places. “They”—foreigners—are the new “we.” They define themselves as anyone wronged—actually or in their own accounting—by the American past. And not only by the American past, as the anecdote illustrates

Suketu Mehta, author of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, explains the thrust of his book: “I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.… It’s our country now.”
Got that? Forget “We the People” and “ourselves and our Posterity.” America is not ours. It’s theirs.

It is surely odd, and notable, that neoliberals and their allies on the hard left have trouble identifying a single social problem that government can’t solve. Yet when confronted with low fertility, they throw up their hands. There’s nothing to be done except import the world!

It is to say that America is not the common property of all mankind, that every one of the world’s nearly eight billion people is not “more American than the Americans.” If everyone in the world is American—actually or potentially—then no one is.

the ruling class has made a bet that however antisocial the behavior of their surrounding serfs and barbarians may get, their own lives will never suffer. The Great March of Progress, led from the top, will go on. The implicit wager here is that states don’t matter, that the Davos Archipelago is a kind of quasi-independent and self-sufficient Hanseatic League

today, owing to ruling-class rapacity, the traditional working and middle classes—who got us through our last experiment with anarchy—are much smaller, poorer, and weaker than they used to be, while those motivated primarily by anti-American revenge are much more numerous and powerful.

5the real nature of the modern American regime: a high-low coalition against the middle. The high—the oligarchs and their (relatively) impecunious but “educated” culturati—team up with the so-called “disfavored” or “disadvantaged” or “marginalized”: the fringe, the poor (but not the taxpaying working class!)

the Demoralization Narrative gives a threefold responses. First, because it’s not your past; none of you personally accomplished any of that and it’s unreasonable to be proud of something you didn’t do. Second, it’s not even your ancestors’ past; they—and you, through falsifying history—stole that past from its real heroes. Third, because your past is shameful and evil